This blog consists of PhotoFeature Stories on artists of all genres, human interest stories, guest blog posts, book reviews, and book excerpts.
CHRIS RICE COOPER is a newspaper writer, feature stories writer, poet, fiction writer, photographer, and painter.
She has a Bachelor's in Criminal Justice and is close to completing her Master's in Creative Writing.
She, her husband Wayne, sons Nicholas and Caleb, cats Nation and Alaska reside in the St. Louis area.

Chris Rice Cooper

Chris on July 28, 2017

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Firefighter/Poet Jonathan Travelstead's "HOW WE BURY OUR DEAD"

Christal Cooper

caccoop@aol.com

https://www.facebook.com/christalann.ricecooper

*Article With Excerpts – 2,214 Words

All excerpts have been given copyright privilege
by Jonathan Travelstead and Cobalt Press

Jonathan
Travelstead’s

HOW WE BURY OUR DEAD:

A Meditation In Grief

O God

Deliver me from the cramp of this water

and the terrifying things I see through it.

Put me back in the play of your torrents,

in Your limpid springs.

Let me no longer be a little goldfish

in its prison of glass

but a living spark

in the gentleness of Your reeds.

-excerpt
from Prayers
from the Ark “The

Prayer of the Goldfish”by Carmen de

Gasztold,
Public Domain

Jonathan Travelstead’s
first poetry collection, How We Bury Our Dead, has been
published by Cobalt Press (March 10, 2015).

www.cobaltreview.com/cobalt-press

How
We Bury Our Dead are intimately autobiographical poems based on
Travelstead’s journey of meditation and grief over his mother’s cancer battles
and death, his experiences as a firefighter overseas during the Iraq War and in
his home state of Illinois, and his wandering through Alaska during the winter
of 2008.

The most compelling
poem for Travelstead, age 33, to write was “Prayer of the Motorcycle”, which he
wrote in the style of French nun Carmen de Gasztold’s Prayers from the Ark.

“Prayers from the Ark it is a collection
of poems written from the point of view of a different insect, or animal, in
which the speaker is thanking a higher power, and also requesting something.

I
love motorcycles, and oratory language, and so my “Prayer of the Motorcycle” is
one that I find myself flipping to.”

Prayer of the Motorcycle

“I tell you,” he replied,“if the

disciples keep queit, the stones

will cry out” – Luke 19:40

Lord, cover my machined skeleton

with soft muscle rippling beneath skin.

Trade me an irregular beat

for the perfect timing in my finned chambers.

Powder-coated steel.Ninety-two octane.

I too am a collection of precious dirts

plucked, fashioned from the earth’s heartbox.

I need sweat air, fluids.Spark.A master.

Give me hunger

beyond the bite into a curve’s pavement.

Lord, give me sight where I have a filament.

If I am their creation, I am yours,

so give me the freedom of a misfiring voice

and the tiny loping engines of cells

whose fuel is bread, meat.

Then let me ascend your highway

with the sputter of wings.

“My
mother had overcome skin and breast cancers before, ultimately losing one
breast. Witnessing four years of chemo treatments and radiation, there is a
point that gets lost in the fog when after remission the doctors would find
another, unrelated cancer.”

Travelstead’s response
was to run away by volunteering for a tour in Kuwait during Operation Iraqi
Freedom as a firefighter for the Air Force National Guard, only to experience
another form of grief via the things he witnessed, his own struggles with mortality,
and PTSD.

“If
I suffered from PTSD- and I want to be clear that the condition is not confined
to the military, or any certain occupation- then it was from separating myself
from friends and family during a time I needed them most.”

He found temporary
escapes via running the treadmill at the base gym and watching The
Sopranos and The Wire religiously, but was not
able to find escape in sleep, and ended up 20 pounds underweight.

“There
was a period of a few weeks while I was overseas in which I was diagnosed with
'Battle Fatigue Syndrome'. I chuckle at that a bit today, as battle had nothing
to do with it. I was an airport and structural firefighter, and so the worst
hazards I had to deal with were extreme temperatures and hazardous atmospheres
or fuel spills, not bullets.

The
diagnosis came from my inability to get more than an hour or two of sleep, what
I believe now was a repressed response to everything in my home life I was
desperately trying to avoid.”

In 2007, he began the
years long process of writing the first two poems from HowWe Bury Our Dead:“Alaska” and “Moose.”

I name you Passage and Forgiveness

to a Cheechako’s camo coat

and for a brief moment

I believe again the prayer

my mother recites

in her hospital bed

where an invisible Jesus

carries the speaker

over sand primordial as glass.

-excerpt,
“Moose”

One
year after he began writing “Moose” and “Alaska” Travelstead decided to pursue
his MFA in Creative Writing with a Focus in Poetry at the University of
Southern Illinois Carbondale.

“I never had any natural talent as I saw
it for writing, and so I always thought I would have to work harder at it than
others. I knew someone like myself would benefit from an MFA program, possibly
more than the person of average interest in pursuing an MFA. I always knew I
wanted to write- needed it- and because of that I joined the Air Force National
Guard for the GI Bill so that when I was accepted I would be able to focus more
completely on the craftsmanship of writing.

I stretched a 3-year program into 5 years.
Because I was already working fulltime in my firefighting career I could only
take one class at a time, which was perfect because I loved working with my professors
Rodney Jones, Judy Jordan, Allison Joseph, and Jon Tribble. In that I was able
to give full attention to, say, blues poetry immediately post-prohibition, or
working on my slant rhyme in a formal, Shakespearean sonnet.”

After returning home from Kuwait for a
few months, he watched his mother endure cancer treatments at St. Louis’s
Barnes-Jewish Hospital and he went through a broken romance.His response was to runaway and hitchhike through
the Alaskan wilderness in the winter of 2008.

The sky scrimmed by the Holgate’s sapphire

holds you beneath it all-

It is easier to remain in motion than to
stop.

Nothing in even the deadfall

you can point to and say is yours,

nothing you can say you are of.

-excerpt,
“Alaska”

While in Alaska, he encountered true friends along the way
who showed him compassion and welcomed him into their homes.He came to the conclusion the reason why he
felt so disconnected was due to the walls he himself built.

"Our seeming lack
of connection whenever we're going through anything is completely false," Travelstead told
journalist Chris Hottensen in an interview for The Southern Illinoisan in
March of 2015."It's our own walls we put up between us and everyone else.
Everyone I met, whether they picked me up or whether I met them in a hostel,
were welcoming to me. The only thing that separates us is the fear of other
people."

He returned in time to
spend one more year with his mother, Jean Ann Travelstead, who died from
complications with a form of rhabdomyosarcoma on June 27thof 2009 at 9:37 a.m. at home with family.

The
year that Travelstead graduated with his Masters, in 2013, was the same year he
wrote his last poem from How We Bury our Dead, “DuPont Paint
Factory.”

“I wrote most of “DuPont
Paint Factory” in a whirlwind blur of about six months, in now what I see as a
need to process its autobiographical content. In it, my partner and I are
called out to an abandoned factory where we witness a protracted electrocution
in which we are completely unable to help.”

Entering the cavernous room,

I can smell it for the first time the way I
always will

(here on forever and forever amen)

the first few moments of each time the tones
drop

in the middle of the night-

rancid meat, bone’s charred power,

fear in a bundle of thick-wristed copper
wires.

-excerpt,
“DuPont Paint Factory”

“On a side note, this
piece won the Gwendolyn Brooks Emerging Writer Contest, and I was invited to
have lunch with the Secretary of State Jesse White and Illinois Poet Laureate
Kevin Stine in Springfield, Illinois. This piece is available in audio and print
online for the Google-savvy.”

During the five years it took for him to
earn his Master’s he encountered numerous poets- in person, or through their
works- that had a huge influence on him and the writing of How We Bury Our Dead:Judy Jordon, Allison Joseph, Rodney Jones,
Jay Meek, Philip Levine, David Bottoms, James Tate, and Larry Levis.

Travelstead
decided to turn his poems into a poetry collection when he noticed that all of
the poems had one theme in common – grief.

“When
I saw the repetition of a tone of grief, and my mother showing up in poems and
lines dealing with things I thought had nothing to do with her. But that's how
it is, isn't it, that what occupies our unconscious comes up and finds a way of
relating itself in strange, sometimes grotesque ways to everything we're doing,
from drinking a glass of orange juice, to trying to be intimate with our
significant other?”

The book of poetry is
divided into four distinct sections attached to their own geography:Kuwait, Alaska, and Travelstead’s work as a
fireman at Murpysboro Fire Department in Southern Illinois.

“I wanted to arrange the poems
chronologically, but in a way that challenged a reader's expectation that the
speaker is experiencing grief in any by-the-numbers way somehow tied to the
passage of time. I want readers to have the sense of how individual the process
of grieving is.”

The
next step was the publication process, which he described as a time of
exhaustion.His manuscript was rejected
by 22 publishers, but was finally accepted by Cobalt Press when Travelstead’s
poem “Trucker” won the 2013 Cobalt Poetry Prize.“Trucker” is one of six smaller poems that
makeup the powerhouse of a poem “Alaska”.

Steel, diamond-plate steps rise into his big
rig, into his world of flannel,

Old Spice cured into split vinyl seams and
cracked upholstery,

the green glow of radios for light.His gorilla palm claps my shoulder

and I believe it when he Jake brakes twenty
tons of chained snowplows

to a stop, says That’s what it sounds like to motorboat

a fat woman’s tits.Eighteen wheels of tractor-trailer unclasp

with an air horn blast, shocking the
heart.Beating it back to life.

He’s copied his favorite Robert Frost poems
by hand onto a legal pad

and scotch-taped them to crumbling headliner
with every pine tree

air freshener he ever bought, each poem dated
in red felt-tip.

I think of yellow-jackets and stringers,
amphetamines. Vats of

burnt coffee swilled down the iced macadam,
and when he says It’s cold

as a fart in a dead Eskimo, it moves through my gut as true as this

landscape’s breath.The doggerel he recites.Carnal.Kind as

the diesel’s throb.Limericks of the North Slopes, clubbing
seals,

rhyming the Alyeska pipeline with you betcha.Slushing past

the weigh station and the cop hidden there, a
warning squelches too late

I
was included at every step of the publication process, to include even layout
and cover design- something authors don't often expect, as publishers' role
tends to be handling the business side of creative works.

On
another note, they also happen to be fantastic hosts. I only just returned from
staying with them in Baltimore for a Cobalt Press first book event in which
Cobalt Press authors read to a packed house.”

www.cobaltreview.com/cobalt-press

Travelstead now
resides in Murphysboro, Illinois, 6 miles west of Carbondale and two hours
southeast of St. Louis, where he works as a firefighter, writes poetry at least
90 minutes per day, and lives with his fiancé Heidi Kocher, and their two pets:
dog, Nora, and cat, Whisky.